


Poor Form

by Hasty (UniformedServiceman)



Category: Zootopia (2016), Zootopia: Shorty Squad
Genre: Couch Cuddles, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 18:56:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9916415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniformedServiceman/pseuds/Hasty
Summary: Percy and Clancy are at a rough patch in their relationship, stemming from unspoken issues on Clancy's end. Hugh and Caitlyn meet to walk around the city. Everyone sidesteps carrying out their words, and end up happy.





	

Percy and Clancy looked away from each other yet touched at the waist. One right leg and one left kept fast against each other from the hip down to Clancy’s calf, where Percy’s paw pointed straight down, trying to make up the distance. The two pinions locked tight to the rail of the bus seat, anchoring them to the chair and one another. The engine noise was loud enough to drown out the sounds of their own breath. Percy drew in at loose intervals, then held a second or so before exhaling all at once, uneven but consistent pauses in between both. Clancy constantly took on air and pushed it out in a long cycle, the halves running over one another with slight stutters and the occasional, unnoticed dead space. Both felt the pattern of the other’s breath, Clancy sensing Percy’s slight twitch and shudder, Percy sensing Clancy’s slow modulation of the lean of his thigh against Percy’s leg, through their bodies. Each came to understand that they were feeling anything at all, then precisely what they were feeling, on their own. Having reached his conclusion, Percy considered the matter, what it “signified” if you could let him dress it up so grand, then let it flit away into the black, to be kept or discarded on his head’s whim. What it liked to keep in his memory were little, almost irreconcilable pieces of themselves and their lives, torn out of bigger pictures and pasted down over one another. Right now you could still see the wheatpaste through the little holes, and there were at least four duplicates that seemed to be there for emphasis. There was a lot of the couple in it, but Percy couldn’t tell what it said about them.

Neither spoke. This was not unusual, but this silence wasn’t a quiet contentment, it was a disease, it sucked out the air, giving them an uncomfortable feeling of weightless and detachment as they found no words, and neither had anything to say.

The bus shook from the power of its own engine, and the two were jostled apart. Clancy snapped back to the middle of the seat instantaneously, gaze still fixed out the window, and he began to lay his weight on his leg, like he thought Percy would’ve stayed fixed in place. But  Percy was occupied elsewhere, staring out the windshield, following the road with his eyes. The avenue fell towards them, block by block, at an easily underestimated speed, so constant it seemed fake, like a rear-projection cinema set. Percy chose one particular point in the length that  followed its progress until it was upon them, under the wheels, gone, joined that very instant by more, pockmarked asphalt like Persian carpet, and he thought about where he wanted to go and what he wanted to find before the world ran out from under him. Out the corner of his eye he saw Clancy righting himself and he promptly returned to his station, clamping his foot against the plastic, lining his heel perpendicular to the floor, and pressing against his companion.

They sat as before. Clancy’s eyes looked a little lower, but his view didn’t change. Percy’s had.

The bus was close to Percy’s stop. Percy figured that if he tried to make plans by text, he’d risk receiving an intentionally late reply. He tapped Clancy’s shoulder to get his attention.

“Hey, could I come over for dinner on Sunday? I know it’s what we usually do, but I don’t know if you have something you might have forgot about going on.” Percy wanted to give him a graceful out.

 “… I’m free after nine. I’d like it if you were the cook this time. I’m no good.” He was setting the time a little later than usual.

 “Sure! Is there anything in particular you’d like me to make?” Percy fiddled with the collar of his sweater. This one was grey; he’d felt daring this morning.

“Can you make some garlic bread?”

“Would you like a little pasta to go with that?” Percy allowed himself the smirk.

“I just want the garlic bread, honestly, but if you gotta have pasta with it, I’ll take it.”

“That’s what I’ll plan for, then. I’ll bring the groceries with me. Can you pull the cord for me, please?”

They exchanged a brief kiss before Percy hopped off. He turned and stood beside the stop pole, finding Clancy’s gaze in one of the windows, and they looked at one another in the eyes for the first time that afternoon through the glass, Clancy turning his head to stay facing Percy as the bus pulled away.

It was a little before five o’clock on what’d turned out to be a nice Friday for November. Percy swaggered in the lobby (no mean feat, pushing doors intended for animals double his size), and was greeted at the elevator with a white sign reading 

“OUT of ORDER”

that doomed him to walking up the stairs.

Progress was extremely awkward. Each step fell a bit above his waist, just too tall for his little legs to clear, and the steps themselves were deep, too long for him to default to scampering on all fours. To climb the stairwell, he had to lean over each step, bend himself to one side and land his shoulders and torso on it, then leverage the rest of his body onto the platform, stand up, and do it again. It was one of the most comically boring things he’d ever done in his life. It took not quite an hour of this before he reached the eighth floor. As he tottered into his apartment, he inspected himself for damages, and narrated, pretending he was a doctor telling somebody their kid had six months. His sweater was, assuredly, ruined.

After a quick shower, he donned some better clothes, flipped on Ermine League Football and called his sister.  

\----

“Hey, Caitlyn! I’m over here!”

Hugh had agreed to meet Caitlyn “by the fountain” in Amethyst Park at 5 on Saturday. He realized only on the morning of that there was, in fact, a second, much smaller fountain at one edge of the park that was a fair bit closer to Caitlyn’s neighborhood. He guessed that that was the only one that she was familiar with, and when the time came he posted himself on a bench there. He’d guessed right.

“Oh, there you are, Hugh!”

It was only five o’clock but it was already fairly dark. There was almost no one on this side of the park. Those who lived in Caitlyn’s neighborhood were, generally speaking, second-generation nouveau riche who kept their distance, leaving the place to bums and lost tourists. Even so, Caitlyn had managed to wander past Hugh once already while looking for him, circling the fountain, before he gave quarter.

“Were you hiding from me or something?”

Hugh smiled, and readied a quip, then noticed her boots. “…Why do your boots have buttons?”

She had been asked the question before, certainly, yet Hugh still saw her face scrunch around while she fumbled for the right answer. Then, she hit it, relaxed her face and looked back in his eyes. “I couldn’t tell you why they made them that way. They look a little funny, but they were fit perfectly, they’re very warm,” she smiled, “and on sale.”

“Nice.”

They started walking north, down Prairie Road, vaguely toward Savannah Central. Hugh needed to go home before work to change, but he wasn’t due in until ten, and he took advantage of the free time to detour. “What’s the destination?” Caitlyn asked playfully, knowing full well Hugh would say “It’s a secret” through his teeth, automatically, like his mouth didn’t have time to make the words. It was something of an odd joke, but both of them liked it, so he kept telling it.

They passed through a couple blocks of the old brownstone tenements.  Hugh always looked for the old winches, bolted to the windows, which long-ago residents used to hang their laundry to dry. Seeing them in the ultra-modern city reminded him how old everything was.

“Check it out, that one still has a little bit of string stuck in it!”

Caitlyn squinted. “…You’re right, it does. How old do you think that must be?”

“No idea. Half a century?”

“Christ.” Caitlyn wrung her hands for a few seconds before putting them in her pockets. Hugh looked at her. She was looking askew between the horizon and the street, grinding her jaw, and he supposed that she was genuinely unnerved thinking about how long that string’d been there.

He changed the subject. “You got a hold of things in your Contract Law class yet?”

She threw him an eye-roll and a half-smile. “No….”

By the time that Caitlyn had finished describing the intricacies of points-system royalties negotiation, they were plodding across the broken sidewalks of northwest Savannah Central. It was a textbook example one of those bizzare paradoxes of metropolis living: the immediate vicinity of major business districts tend to be rather beat-up, nasty places, without a single open store or restaurant for blocks. They let a little silence build up a minute, looking at their feet, until Hugh, running out of time, moved to fill it:

“You heard anythin’ about Percy and Clancy lately?”

She gave a closed-mouth sigh. Hugh put on a concerned look in his eyes and held the ends of his mouth down. “He just called me about that yesterday. They’ve hit a little bit of a rough patch.” She paused and turned her purse in her hand, then spoke so quickly afterward that it was clear to Hugh she hadn’t been thinking about how to say it, but how much. “It’s not that they’re upset with each other. Clancy just seems to be a little cagey lately, and he doesn’t want to talk about what the matter is. Percy’s just trying to keep things going without forcing a ‘big talk’, and see if things brighten up.”

“I get it.” The cold air bred desperation in him and forced what he didn’t want to say out of his lungs. “Does he seem happy?”

“Percy?”

“Yeah-“

but she hadn’t waited for a response, and spoke over him, “Oh, he’s great. He seemed more annoyed than upset.”

“Great.” He pulled up an excuse. “I didn’t get to see him this week, super busy. That’s why I ask.”

“Ask about how your best friend is doing?” Caitlyn giggled. “That’s highly suspect, Hugh,”

 and just like that, there were at their destination, a nice, inexpensive crêperie a couple dozen blocks or so north of Hugh’s place. The instant that Caitlyn saw it, she knew it was where they were going. It was her favorite food. “Why didn’t you tell me, you asshole? I had dinner plans,” she said in a parody of frustration.

“Shit, I’m sorry.” Hugh hadn’t thought of that, and looking at her he wasn’t sure if Caitlyn was exaggerating so much just to cover for bile. He gave a sheepish smile and made damn sure to cover the check.

 They went in, and got their treats: Caitlyn a bug-pepper-mushroom delight, and Hugh a simple custard-filled, chilled (as he preferred). In the interest of time, they took it to go. It had taken them longer to get there than expected. Hugh wasn’t sure why.

He walked her to the entrance of the subway line, on the edge of the office sprawl. It was under an especially bright streetlamp on an overlarge corner paved with fresh, almost glowing concrete, but almost in defiance the night seemed to curl in spirals under and around them, like dye in water.

Hugh summoned the courage. “Before you go – can you tell Percy I care about him, you know?”

“…Sure?”

Hugh hadn’t meant to say something quite that retarded, but having forced his own hand he moved to spin his words. “I mean, I’m just worried that he bottles things up sometimes,” he hesitated, “especially regarding him and Clancy, and I just want him to know he can talk to me about it without me judging him. Clancy and I don’t see eye to eye, everyone knows that, but Percy loves him, and I don’t want that to be something standing between us. He shouldn’t have to shut up about it around me. I don’t want him to.”

Caitlyn’s mouth hung slightly open, and she leaned her shoulders back, readying herself to turn away, and to Hugh it seemed too rapid to be unrelated. The dark pooled around them and obscured his vision. Hugh realized that he had canted forward, and hurriedly relaxed his stance, brought his legs back together,  and hoped she hadn’t noticed. He stared as her face turned sunny and she spoke, ringing teary,

“Christ, Hugh, that means a lot to me. He’s been worried about that a lot lately, I just didn’t want to say anything. I’ll let him know the instant I see him next, ‘cause I want to tell him that to his face.” She came in close and tapped on his stomach, indicating she wanted a hug, and he obliged, picking her up in his arms and giving her a squeeze before putting her back down.

“You’re a great friend, to Percy and to me.”

He played his puzzled smile straight. “Well, hell, thanks.”

“Love you, Hugh! Goodnight!” and she darted down the yawning hollow, two steps at a time, leaving Hugh to kick the pavement until he was home, lying on his bed half-finished, having pulled off his old shirt but not showered and put on his uniform. The clock gave him an hour. He needed a little more.

Under the water in the shower, he thought of him, and hoped that he’d care that he’d thought of him. He wanted something a little more than caring. He knew it wasn’t coming.

He buttoned the last button on his shirt as he walked out the door, locking it and pulling it shut in a fluid motion he’d practiced and was quite proud of. It was black as pitch in his alcove; he moved slowly up the few stairs that took him to the front door, until some of the orange light from the street bled in and painted him a way outside.

\--------------------------------------------------

Clancy poured another jigger of bourbon in the cocktail shaker. He pregamed pretty heavily the nights Percy came over; Percy seemed to think that everybody ought to be happy when they drink, and that if they aren’t, then something’s wrong, and suddenly you’re getting polite, penetrating, chiding questions about your life that try to kickstart a confession you don’t want. Clancy could hold his liquor, and Percy didn’t seem to notice that he’d been drinking if he wasn’t holding one in his hand right then, so he just slugged ahead of time.

He dropped a hunk of orange peel in the glass and it was complete. He left the drink by the knifeblock on the counter for a minute to let the ingredients blend together, and went to tidy the living room. He did almost everything in his life at a seat in his kitchen nook, so it was no surprise that the living room was looking a bit neglected, but Clancy was taken by the fact that it was downright frowzy. When had he knocked over the magazine rack? How? He shambled to the northern corner and put the product of a vanity subscription to _The Anthem_ to rights, then turned his attention to the sofa, folding his throw blankets back into nice, neat squares and laying them in their appointed places. The couch was the only thing of his grandmother’s that his father hadn’t sold after she died; the cheap, ugly floral print fabric had been worn totally bare in a number of places, which gave Clancy a great excuse to bang out a couple of similarly colored blankets. It sat, with homemade blankets and distressed fabric, like a work of art on loan from another age, facing a flat-screen and flanked by the glass and plastic that styled the new millennium. It was the only piece of furniture Clancy owned that he thought was his.

He cleared the armful’s worth of detritus from the coffee table and brought it to the kitchen to sort it. The first sip of the drink ran over his lips with a genial nip, livening the task of sorting through old receipts that needed to be kept, old receipts that could be thrown away, and useless wrappers for yesterday’s midnight snacks. He’d just gotten through the pile when he heard a knock. Clancy gulped the drink, choking down the peel, put the cup in the sink and split hotfoot to the door.

“Sorry.”

Percy was clutching the groceries to his chest. “It’s okay.” He meant it.

He beelined for the kitchen. Clancy shut the door, following him with his eyes to the counter and noticing that the kitchen light was the only one on in the place. He walked over to floor lamp in the corner of the living room, threw the switch, and looked over the space; after a little bit of dragging around, the light made a scene he liked, and he flatfootedly walked into the kitchen. Percy was facing away from him. He’d already sorted out his ingredients into piles aside from Clancy’s trash heap and was gathering utensils. Clancy waited until he’d laid the knife on the cutting board before he slinked behind him and slowly wrapped his arms around him. Percy burst into a short fit of involuntary convulsions like death throes before his rational mind prevailed, and he froze entirely, ramrod stiff, in Clancy’s arms.

“I-“

“shhh. It’s fine, I know.” This happened every time. Clancy did it anyway, with Percy’s permission, in the interest of adjusting Percy to the sensation, but privately he hoped Percy’d never stop. The embrace continued for some time. Percy quietly laid his hands over Clancy’s. Clancy shifted his head down Percy’s back. Percy closed his eyes. When Clancy felt a very slight twitch in Percy’s stomach, he took it as a signal, let go, and walked over to his sorting piles.

“What kinda sauce?”

Percy shook a jar. “Tomato and Basil, presumably.”

“I have some basil, if you think it’d fly right with more.”

"I was going to ask, actually.”

Clancy pitched the selected discards in the trash, and put the needed receipts and bill stubs in a little corner by the coffeemaker.

“What are you doing over there?” Percy looked to him with an honest, bright-eyed curiosity as he wound back his sweater sleeves.

Clancy explained, and in short order the conversation centered on the seemingly arbitrary nature of the “service fee” on electric bills. Percy seemed to think it a mystery of unknowable origin, and said it came from some deeper impulse in the animal psyche that demanded its inclusion. Even to him, this answer was unsatisfying.

 “It doesn’t give a reason for why the price changes.”

Clancy had said it before, but it evidently deserved repeating. “ ‘s money, Percy. The answer’s greed, somewhere in it.”

“If it was greed, why wouldn’t they just charge more for the energy itself?” Percy was circumventing the slight strength afforded his arms proper by shimmying the right part of his body in time with the rise and fall of the knife. The carrot, in pieces, was already in the salad bowl when Clancy came back with a reply.

“If you make up a strange pretense for your bullshit, you can get away with a lot by making suckers doubt themselves. They’ll worry they’d say something ignorant or look stupid, and they’ll pay to keep their peace of mind.”

Percy let the slur slide. “That’s evil.”

“Good business is sinister.”

“I think I do good business, and I just try to help people.” Percy huffed in mock offense, but his remark was serious.

“I don’t want to say you aren’t important, Percy, but you only abet the sale. The business proper is above.”

Percy stuck his tongue out at him while he cranked a timer for the pasta. “Get behind me.”

Clancy smiled at him, then turned, shut his eyes, and asked himself why he always had to be right, only to hear the question again as it tapped against the sides of his skull, falling through him.

……

Clancy squared off the table setting and lit a candle in the middle. It smelled something like vanilla.  Percy hopped in, carrying two plates heaped with pasta and salad. Clancy didn’t bring up the garlic bread.

They took their places, kneeling, planted on cushions, their plates kitty-cornered on one edge of the coffee table. Clancy laid his right arm out toward Percy, over the open space just beyond the jutting edge of the table, and Percy grabbed it with his left just above the elbow. They looked over one another for a short time, then slid their arms apart, curled their hands together, had a brief kiss, and let go to eat.

The conversation Clancy had shot earlier was left to die. What took its place was decidedly general: a number of scattershot comments on recent events led to a few uninstructive questions about work, which tumbled to talk about the weather,

and by then Clancy knew Percy was holding something back.

“From the sound of it, it’s raining outside. You want to talk about something, Percy?”

“Yes.” He’d been caught out, but it seemed to just put a spark in his eyes and prod him to get it over with. Clancy took a big bite of pasta while he still had the chance. “Why have you been so standoffish lately? Is something wrong?” Percy sipped his water.  “Are you upset with me, or is this a,” he averted his eyes and stabbed for the word, but missed, “life-wide thing? Can I help you?”

There was a silence. Percy seemed to be gearing for an argument, judging from fidgeting, but Clancy moved to defuse the situation. “I’m sorry for being cold lately. For the record, it’s not s’pposed to say anything about you. I love you. Please gimmie a minute to figure how to say it.” With that, Percy calmed enough to eat his dinner.

Clancy spent most of the next couple minutes trying to gear down his language so Percy wouldn’t think he needed therapy, without making it an obvious lie. He looked around the room, scouring the walls for hints and cues on how to keep things simple. It didn’t give up much, but he managed, and then it was just a matter of saying the first sentence.

“I don’t want to ruin things. We’ve talked about the past before,”

Percy looked up with more than a little annoyance,

“and I know you’ve forgiven me, and I don’t doubt you for a second. I feel guilty about what I did, but that’s not what’s bugging me.”

“The trouble’s in me. I saw you grow up, and you grew up, bloomed. You got less vain, less whiny, more self-confident, and most of all cultivated a deep current of honesty in what you say and do. To win all this you needed antastic self-control, self-direction, and good intentions. And all of those things show when you talk to me. You correct yourself, you think about the future, and when talk over daily troubles with me, you look at your actions critically, and ask me what you could’ve done better. You’re looking forward.

I have plenty of issues. Every other word I gotta filter out like a censor, otherwise it’d just be vitriol. I find it hard to care about what other people want, and when I know, to give it to them if there’s nothing in it for me. I’m manipulative. I’m selfish. Those are problems, but the core here is that I can’t seem to change. I’ll do meditation exercise shit to try and de-stress, then I’ll scream at the guy who knocks at the door. I’ll lend a friend money to be kind, then I’ll treat him like shit until he’s paid me back, like the cash is fucking haunting me. Even when I’m with you, the biggest dude in my life, I can’t keep myself from spitting acid on small talk, preen my feathers on cheap victories. I don’t think I’ve changed at all since I was a kid. I just hid it some, and to keep hiding it as best I can I always gotta look back, I don’t want to hold you stand by, and watch, and wait.”   
  
Percy looked a little bemused. “The ‘You’re Too Good For Me’ number, is it?”,

then saw Clancy was misty-eyed, and awkwardly shuffled from his place to take him in his arms.

“Christ, I just don’t want to fuck you over. I don’t know if I’m ever gonna change and I don’t want you to spend your life finding out.”

Percy didn’t say anything. They held each other a few minutes, both on their knees. Clancy rubbed his hands over Percy’s sweater in circles. He didn’t want to cry in front of Percy, it made things too intense, and now was just trying to calm himself back down as quickly as possible so they could fix things. After a little bit Clancy felt it’d be best if he let go, and then neither knew quite what to do with themselves so they looked aimlessly around a few moments before Percy went back to his cushion to settle the matter. They sat cross-legged and stared in the other’s eyes, hoping that the other would be the first to speak. The clock in the kitchen, previously inaudible, became a deafening roar, each crash of the second hand implying that all those comments on honesty weren’t necessarily true.

Percy took the high road. “I’m sorry for being a blasé little twit.”

“I understand, Percy. I was being overdramatic. I needed a test anyways.”

“You don’t have to prove yourself to me.”

“I have no satisfaction until I do.”

Percy considered another jibe before he caught himself. “Can I make it easier?”

Clancy walked over to him, and kissed him, and they held it for long enough to cover that they both knew he couldn’t. They traded spit to still what didn’t sit right with them. Clancy broke the embrace, killed the floor lamp, then led Percy to the couch. The candle was low, bright red running around along the walls while they laid on their backs, staring on the ceiling where its light didn’t reach. Clancy wanted to spit on the candle, make it flare up so that the light would brighten just enough to show where the wall ended and the celling began. As it stood now, it seemed like he was hovering over a pit. Percy, thank God, spoke.

“You’re overthinking this. I love you, as you are, and I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time staying with somebody I love, who talks to me like nobody else does and can still say so much with so little. I love you, not the perfect somebody you want to be, but I’m happy you want to be a better person, and I’ll stay with you as long as it takes.

 Okay?”

“Okay.”

For the first time that evening, Clancy felt like he’d said the right thing.


End file.
